Over 700,000 people on US watch list: Once you get on, there’s no way off

A US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent checks the identification and boarding pass of a passenger as she passes through security in the terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia (AFP Photo / Saul Loeb)

The names of nearly three-quarters of a million individuals have been secretly added to watch lists administered by the United States government, but federal officials are adamant about keeping information about these rosters under wraps.

A report by the New York Times’ Susan Stellin published over the
weekend attempted to shine much-deserved light on an otherwise
largely unexposed program of federal watch lists, but details
about these directories — including the names of individuals on
them and what they did to get there — remain as elusive as ever.

More than 12 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, federal agencies continue to keep lists on hand containing
names of individuals of interest: people who often end up
un-cleared to enter or exit the US due to an array of activity
that could be considered suspicious or terrorist-related to
government officials.

In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that an
Inspector General of the Department of Justice report found at
least 700,000 individual names on the database maintained by the
Terrorist Screening Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
sub-office tasked with overseeing the “single database of
identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected
of being involved in terrorist activity.” Five years later,
that number of suspicious persons is reportedly close to what it
was at the time. Half-a-decade down the road, however, Americans
and foreign nationals who end up on the government’s radar are
offered little chance to find out how they ended there, or even
file an appeal.

According to some, that’s just the start of what’s wrong with
these lists.

“If you’ve done the paperwork correctly, then you can
effectively enter someone onto the watch list,” SUNY Buffalo
Law School associate professor Anya Bernstein told Stellin for
this weekend’s report. What’s more, though, according to
Bernstein, is that “There’s no indication that agencies
undertake any kind of regular retrospective review to assess how
good they are at predicting the conduct they’re targeting,”
suggesting that anyone can be targeted and added to such a list
with little oversight to protect them.

“When you have a huge list of people who are likely to commit
terrorist acts, it’s easy to think that terrorism is a really big
problem and we should be devoting a lot of resources to fighting
it,” Bernstein added. With almost no transparency and
outrages aplenty, though, she argues that the government’s watch
lists are largely flawed and can erroneously ruin an innocent
person’s life.

Such is the case with Rahinah Ibrahim, 48-year-old a former
Standard University doctoral student who was expected to be in
federal court in San Francisco, California Monday morning for the
latest hearing in a case that stems from an incident in 2005 that
ended with her learning she had been added to a terrorist watch
list. Ibrahim was attempting to board a Hawaii-bound plane from
San Francisco International Airport in traditional Muslim garb
when she was taken into custody and told she had landed herself
on a terrorist watch list. Nearly a decade later Ibrahim
continues to disavow any connections with terrorism, but the
issues surrounding the watch list program has made it seemingly
impossible to find out what she did, let alone have her name
removed from the list.

“We’ve tried to get discovery into whether our client has been
surveilled and have been shut down on that,” Elizabeth
Pipkin, a lawyer representing Ms. Ibrahim, added to the Times.
“They won’t answer that question for us.”

"She doesn't want this to happen to other people -- to be
wrongfully included on these lists that haunt them for years and
years," Pipkin said recently to Northern California’s Mercury
News.

"No one knows how the targets get on the lists," she said.
"The government has never contested this case on the merits.
We don't think they have a defense."

But with Monday’s hearing coming nearly a decade after Ibrahim
first found herself in trouble, the likelihood of any reform
coming soon to the watch list system seems slim-to-none. ACLU
lawyer Hina Shamsi even told the Times that the system keeping
the watch lists in tact seems to be more flawed than the one
guarding over terrorist suspects held at America’s military
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“People who are accused of being enemy combatants at
Guantánamo have the ability to challenge their detention, however
imperfect that now is,” Shamsi told Stellin. “It makes no
sense that people who have not actually been accused of any
wrongdoing can’t challenge.”

A Terrorist Screening Center official reached for comment by the
Times claimed that fewer than one percent of those listed on such
rosters are US citizens or legal permanent residents, but as
Stellin points out, “there is no way to confirm that
number.”